Социология религии_общее (англ.) / Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

of congregations and religious movements, while in-depth interviews, speeches, published texts, and archival materials provide insights into the nature of religious discourse (Becker and Eiesland 1997).

Although these various methods all contribute valuable information, it is important to acknowledge another common misunderstanding: that quantitative data in itself is somehow inimical to the study of religion (perhaps because it simplifies a necessarily complex topic). Quite the contrary. Polls and surveys about religion have become so common in recent years that they are now intrinsic to our understanding of who we are religiously: Let one poll show a slight upward trend in church attendance and journalists announce a “religious awakening”; let another poll show a slight decrease, and religion suffers from a “collapse.” The challenge is for all educated people, whatever their discipline, to gain at least a rudimentary understanding of surveys, sampling, and statistical analysis. Surprising at it may seem, especially with the amount of polling that accompanies national elections, it is still possible to find graduate and undergraduate students (often in the humanities) who do not understand how generalizations can be made from a small sample to a large population, when or when not to use the term “sample,” and how one might possibly “control for” the effects of race, gender, or education level. Students who have not already done so, should consult one of the many readable introductions to sociological methods (e.g., Babbie 1997).

Just as quantitative data require skill to collect and interpret, qualitative studies also depend on specialized training. Here the difficulty arises from scholars not taking seriously enough the particular training to which sociologists of religion are typically exposed. Armed with an interesting topic and confidence that one is a good conversationalist, literary critics, theologians, and historians (perhaps with the encouragement of a small research grant) set off to do qualitative interviews not realizing that the craft of framing questions, asking them properly, and including the right follow-ups should be as foreign to them as that of a sociologist examining rare manuscripts in an archive. At minimum, scholars interested in utilizing qualitative methods should gain a rudimentary understanding of the skills required (Burawoy 1991; Strauss and Corbin 1998; Atkinson 1998).

Whether quantitative or qualitative data are used, an additional misunderstanding is that work is somehow more sociological if it employs explicit hypotheses than if it does not. Hypothesis formulation is a valuable exercise in sociology, but there is also a reason why it seems strange to the inquiring student: It frequently takes the form of pitting one na¨ıve view of the world against an equally naive view, instead of recognizing that events typically have multiple causes and multiple explanations. Where hypotheses are most helpful is determining whether or not one has an argument at all. Sociological studies of religion, in this respect, are helped by having a clear, strong, and compelling argument, just as work in other disciplines is.

As the sociology of religion has matured, the single methodological characteristic that most often sets good work apart from mediocre work continues to be the strategic use of comparisons. Quantitative research necessarily involves comparisons; qualitative work should, too. Students of religion, too, often neglect this basic insight, either because they want to examine one case intensively or because they refuse to consider what an appropriate comparison might be. The intellectual challenge is to recognize the rich possibilities that are always present for comparisons, including temporal and spatial comparisons, as well as ones based on gender, religion, or ethnicity.

MISUNDERSTANDINGS ABOUT NORMATIVE CONCERNS

Besides theoretical and methodological questions, concerns about normative issues persistently emerge in the relationships between religion and sociology. My student who is interested in sibling differences is likely to think it strange that sociology requires bracketing her interests in healing conflicts between siblings or finding ways to combat authoritarian parenting styles that may be rooted in religious beliefs. To be told that she must approach her topic “scientifically” will seem odd when she knows that she selected it because of some deep concern from her personal experience. Adopting a “value-neutral” perspective will seem strained if she recognizes that much of what she reads in sociology is hardly free of normative concerns.

These concerns can be illustrated by a graduate student who, when asked by another member of a seminar if her work was going to include a normative focus, vehemently denied that she had any normative intentions. Her study – an interesting analysis of Jewish kitsch (Nike yarmulkes, Mickey Mouse dreidls, plastic Torahs) – was to focus purely on a description of the phenomenon under investigation and an explanation of why some people were attracted to it more than others. But why, I wondered, was she interested in the topic in the first place? And what difference would it make if she succeeded in producing a brilliant study of it?

This example suggests the difficulty of drawing a hard-and-fast line between normative concerns and empirical concerns (and of associating sociology exclusively with the latter). The student came to her topic because of an interest in material culture, which has recently attracted attention as a dimension of religious expression that may have deeper meaning and more staying power than theological arguments do, especially in a religiously diverse context (McDannell 1995; Joselit 1994; Wuthnow 1999). Yet the student also recognized that goods produced for mass consumption can trivialize the sacred, leaving it somehow inauthentic. In addition, one person’s definition of kitsch may be another person’s definition of fine art (often because of social class differences). In short, the project was thoroughly laced with normative issues, and to ignore them would be to diminish the importance of doing it. What the student meant to say was that she was not going to take a stand at the start as to whether kitsch was good or bad. Hopefully, by the end of her study, she would be in a position to make some evaluative claims.

To be sure, one of the fears on the part of scholars in the discipline at large that sometimes influences their perceptions of work in sociology of religion is that its authors are themselves so wedded to a particular religious orientation that their study (if not their entire career trajectory) will be guided by that commitment. This fear, however, fades in comparison to the greater concern that scholarship (in whatever field) is pursued simply as a kind of game, perhaps to promote one’s career or because an oddity occurred to them that nobody else had examined. The intellectual challenge is identifying problems of sufficient gravity to make some difference to an audience beyond that of a few like-minded peers. If this challenge is not met, then adopting a “sociological” stance toward religion will seem peculiar indeed.

Concerns about normative issues require us to return briefly to the subject of theory. The works of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and other classic figures remain of interest to contemporary sociologists of religion, not so much for specific testable hypotheses that may have been neglected by previous generations of scholars, but as a kind of common moral discourse. In part, this discourse is the glue that holds the field together, just as

stories of founding figures provide cohesion to a nation: If nothing else, people who otherwise share little can sense an affinity for one another because they have read the same authors and know the same books. In larger measure, though, the classic works serve as a legitimate way of bringing normative concerns into a scholarly setting that often pretends not to honor such concerns. Studying the poor can be justified in terms of a Weberian analysis of social class, for instance, rather than having to acknowledge that one actually cares about the poor.

As the classic works fade farther into the past, one of the challenges facing sociologists of religion is finding a language in which to express their normative concerns. For many, concerns about racial oppression, gender inequality, and discrimination based on sexual preference provide such a language. But such languages always require close examination, extension, and reinvention. In the future, the greatest intellectual challenge posed by normative concerns is likely to be that of religious pluralism. Greater diversity and more extensive interaction among members of religious communities will necessitate confronting thorny questions about the correctness of particular religious teachings and the survival of particular religious communities.

A BASIS FOR DISCIPLINARY INTEGRITY

Thus far, I have argued that studies of religion blend more easily with the theoretical concerns of sociology as a discipline than is sometimes supposed, that there is considerable room for methodological diversity, and that students of religion need not leave their normative concerns at the door in order to do respectable sociology. But if all this is the case, then the question arises: Isn’t the study of religion pretty easily turned into an interdisciplinary affair? The answer to this question, I think, is to a large extent, yes, and I will say more about that in a moment. But first it does seem to me that disciplines such as sociology still matter and we need to be clear about why they matter.

When I say that disciplines matter, I mean this in both an intellectual and a pragmatic sense. Intellectually, they matter (or should matter) because they embody a corpus of insights and understandings that cannot be readily found elsewhere; and pragmatically, they matter (or should matter) because they exercise certain enforceable standards of evaluation over the work of practitioners who identify with them. But what can the basis of this intellectual and pragmatic “matter-ing” be? It cannot be, I have suggested, that sociology is bending its efforts toward the construction of a distinctive theoretical edifice that matters more than any of the substantive topics it addresses, and it cannot be the deployment of a methodological apparatus that only its practitioners are skilled in using. Bringing distinctive normative concerns – or avoiding all such concerns – cannot be a basis for a disciplinary integrity, either.

The single defensible basis for a distinct approach to the study of religion that we would call sociological has to be an arbitrary one: That the academic enterprise at this stage in its development has become so vast and so complex that specialization is a necessity. It is a necessity both for the production of good scholarly work and for the evaluation of such work. The goal of scholarship, not only in research but also in teaching, is surely to nurture “A” quality work over “B” quality work and to encourage more “B” quality work than “C” quality work, and so on. But to do so requires focusing one’s time and energy, learning a certain body of literature, and mastering an

appropriate set of research skills. To evaluate such work also requires a similar focusing of time and energy.

Disciplinary boundaries are, for this reason, arbitrary but also necessary. They are arbitrary because many different clusters of specialization and expertise are conceivable. The ones that happened to take shape did so for historical and institutional (as well as intellectual) reasons, but others could have developed under other circumstances. They are necessary, however, because scholarship is always a social enterprise, rather than purely the work of isolated individuals. Scholars draw ideas from others with whom they interact intellectually, professionally, and socially, and these networks become the basis for evaluating one another’s work.

For all its diversity, sociology of religion is a well-institutionalized subfield within the discipline of sociology (which is also well-institutionalized). Its practitioners conduct much of the best work available on such topics as the social correlates of religious belief and participation, religious movements, the social characteristics of congregations, and the emergence and functioning of diverse religious subcultures. Their interests frequently overlap with scholars in religious studies, anthropology, political science, psychology, history, and theology. Yet the work of sociologists of religion draws distinctively on its own intellectual traditions, mentoring relationships, and social networks.

Intradisciplinary interaction between sociologists of religion and sociologists with interests in other fields is also encouraged – and should be encouraged – by the existence of such institutional configurations as departments, disciplinary majors, and disciplinary graduate programs. Unlike religious studies programs, where research often concentrates entirely on the texts and practices of particular religious traditions, sociology of religion functions primarily at the intersection of religious factors and other aspects of social life (such as family, political behavior, communities, work, sexuality, the arts, and leisure). The best research often combines insights about religion with new developments in these other specialty areas. Indeed, one clear mark of the effectiveness of sociology of religion as a subfield is the fact that studies of other social phenomena increasingly include measures of religion as a factor to consider, just as they do measures of social class, gender, and race.

If this argument for disciplinary integrity emphasizes convenience more than some might like, its value lies in defending disciplinary boundaries without elevating them too high. Networks among peers, mentors, and students within sociology should be cultivated, as they currently are, but not to the point of discouraging interdisciplinary work. Furthermore, the networks that bind sociologists of religion to one another are likely to be stronger than those that develop between sociologists of religion and sociologists with other areas of specialization – a possibility that grows with the expansion of e-mail, the Internet, and other forms of electronic communication. Thus, students who come to professors seeking help in making their studies of religion more sociological are likely to find themselves referred to books, articles, and opportunities for direct contact with specialists at other universities as much as with faculty in other departments at their own university.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR MULTIDISCIPLINARY EXCHANGE

Although disciplinary boundaries need to be preserved, opportunities for sociologists of religion to interact with scholars in other fields have increased over the past few decades

and appear likely to develop further in the foreseeable future. These opportunities come about through participation in multidisciplinary organizations (such as the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the American Academy of Religion), through specialized programs and new majors for undergraduates (such as American Studies, African-American Studies, or Women’s Studies), and through various research centers and institutes (Roof 1999b).

One form of interaction across disciplines consists of research and teaching involving scholars from different disciplines, or work done by an individual scholar that intentionally spans disciplines. Examples include studies combining history and ethnography, historical data with new insights from gender studies or organizational analysis, or sociological studies of congregations that include theological interpretations (Orsi 1985; Griffith 1997; Hall 1999). Sociological concepts and methods are frequently evident in such studies, even when the primary author’s training is in another discipline. A second form of interaction consists of organized research projects or centers. Interaction of this kind has increased in recent years as funding for research has become more readily available. Yet another form of multidisciplinary interaction occurs through programs and centers specifically designed to encourage exchanges across a variety of disciplines.

The principal advantage of multidisciplinary interaction is that it encourages scholarship to be clearer about its assumptions and the reasons for its existence. A further advantage of multidisciplinary interaction (perhaps as a by-product) is that it often generates greater appreciation of the strengths of a particular disciplinary approach. In addition, multidisciplinary research and teaching integrates the study of religion into various disciplines and departments, showing that religion is not an autonomous realm, populated only by believers and fellow travelers, but a feature of human life that has broad implications for the understanding of such diverse topics as politics, ethics, and literature.

CONCLUSION

Perhaps the most daunting aspect of studying any topic concerning religion and wanting to make it sociological is that the number of studies, faculty, and students interested in such topics has mushroomed during the past fifty – and even the past twenty – years. Part of this growth is attributable to the fact that higher education generally has expanded during this time, and the growth also has been fueled by resources from foundations for sponsored research and by greater inclusion of courses about religion in universities. Whereas the challenge in an earlier era was to find any relevant information on particular topics, now the challenge is sorting out the best studies and concentrating on topics that are truly worthy of one’s time.

What makes this explosion of information manageable is the fact that electronic indexing and reference services now make it possible to search more easily for relevant studies. Texts, anthologies, and handbooks provide starting points, but are readily supplemented by online syllabi, discussion groups, abstracts, and full-text journals. A student interested in sibling differences in religion need only identify a few key words in order to locate dozens of relevant articles and books.

Electronic information nevertheless cannot fully address the lingering concern that there may be something awkward about studying religion from a sociological perspective. This awkwardness, I have suggested, stems largely from misunderstandings

about sociological theory, methods, and normative concerns. Sociology, just as religion, adapts to its surroundings by creating an identity for itself and by developing arguments that justify its existence. Wading into the literature produced by earlier generations of sociologists, one often senses that they protested too much – producing studies and treatises that aimed mostly to demonstrate that it was beneficial to adopt a sociological perspective on the world. As the discipline has matured, there has been less need of such posturing. And, as sociology gains a firmer sense of its own identity, the study of religion will surely find even more room in which to flourish.

his influence has not moved far beyond him by placing ritual at the core of any kind of social interaction whatsoever. While, on the one hand, this might be seen as broadening the idea of ritual to include “secular ritual,” the same development, on the other, might be seen as disclosing an element of the sacred, and thus of the religious, at the very basis of social action of any kind. Recent work of Randall Collins represents this development most clearly. In The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), he combines Durkheim and Goffman (1967) to define the basic social event as, in Goffman’s phrase, an interaction ritual. At the most fundamental level interaction rituals involve:

1.a group of at least two people physically assembled;

2.who focus attention on the same object or action, and each becomes aware that the other is maintaining this focus;

3.who share a common mood or emotion.

In this process of ritual interaction the members of the group, through their shared experience, feel a sense of membership, however fleeting, with a sense of boundary between those sharing the experience and all those outside it; they feel some sense of moral obligation to each other, which is symbolized by whatever they focused on during the interaction; and, finally, they are charged with what Collins calls emotional energy but which he identifies with what Durkheim called moral force. Since, according to Collins (1998: 22–4), all of social life consists of strings of such ritual interactions, then ritual becomes the most fundamental category for the understanding of social action. Collins then makes another move that has, I believe, the greatest significance:

Language itself is the product of a pervasive natural ritual. The rudimentary act of speaking involves . . . group assembly, mutual focus, common sentiment; as a result, words are collective representations, loaded with moral significance. (ibid.: 47)

RITUAL AND THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

This observation of Collins, in turn, suggests a digression into the present evolutionary understanding of the origin of language. The origin of language was for long a taboo subject because it opened the door to unrestrained speculation. The question remains and probably will always remain, speculative, but advances in neurophysiology on the one hand and Paleolithic archaeology on the other have opened the door to much more disciplined forms of speculation such as that of Terrence Deacon (1997) in his book The Symbolic Species. Deacon is a biological anthropologist and neuroscientist and his book is subtitled “the co-evolution of language and the brain.” Deacon is trying to understand the emergence of language among our ancestral hominids whose brains were not organized for language use, although, as we know, our nearest primate relatives can, with the most enormous effort and external training, be taught at least a rudimentary use of words. But, as Deacon puts it, “The first hominids to use symbolic communication were entirely on their own, with very little in the way of external supports. How then, could they have succeeded with their chimpanzeelike brains in achieving this difficult result? . . . In a word, the answer is ritual.”

Deacon (ibid.: 402–3) makes the case for the parallel between teaching symbolic communication to chimpanzees and the origin of language in ritual as follows:

Indeed, ritual is still a central component of symbolic “education” in modern societies, though we are seldom aware of its modern role because of the subtle way it is woven into the fabric of society. The problem for symbolic discovery is to shift attention from the concrete to the abstract; from separate indexical links between signs and objects to an organized set of relations between signs. In order to bring the logic of [sign-sign] relations to the fore, a high degree of redundancy is important. This was demonstrated in the experiments with the chimpanzees. . . . It was found that getting them to repeat by rote a large number of errorless trials in combining lexigrams enabled them to make the transition from explicit and concrete sign-object associations to implicit sign-sign associations. Repetition of the same set of actions with the same set of objects over and over again in a ritual performance is often used for a similar purpose in modern human societies. Repetition can render the individual details of some performance automatic and minimally conscious, while at the same time the emotional intensity induced by group participation can help focus attention on other aspects of the object and actions involved. In a ritual frenzy, one can be induced to see everyday activities and objects in a very different light.2

But if repetition and redundancy are always, as we shall see, important in ritual, what was the evolutionary push that made the transition from indexical to symbolic signs essential, and therefore the ritual mechanism so indispensable? Deacon describes the situation at the period of this critical transition:

The near synchrony in human prehistory of the first increase of brain size, the first appearance of stone tools for hunting and butchery, and a considerable reduction in sexual dimorphism is not a coincidence. These changes are interdependent. All are symptoms of a fundamental restructuring of the hominid adaptation, which resulted in a significant change in feeding ecology, a radical change in social structure, and an unprecedented (indeed, revolutionary) change in representational abilities. The very first symbols ever thought, or acted out, or uttered on the face of the earth grew out of this socio-ecological dilemma, and so they may not have been very much like speech. They also probably required considerable complexity of social organization to bring the unprepared brains of these apes to comprehend fully what they meant. . . . Symbolic culture was a response to a reproductive problem that only symbols could solve: the imperative of representing a social contract. (ibid.: 401)

Ritual is common in the animal world, including among the primates. But nonhuman ritual is always indexical, not symbolic; that is, it points to present realities, not to future contingencies. The primary focus of animal ritual is on issues of great importance and uncertainty: Sex and aggression. Through ritual actions animals represent to each other their readiness or unreadiness for sexual contact or for combat. Through the ritual “dance” an unwilling partner may be “persuaded” to engage in sexual intercourse,

2In spite of the Durkheimian echoes of this passage, Deacon makes no reference to Durkheim, nor to Goffman or Collins. The strength of disciplinary boundaries seems to have necessitated independent discovery, although we cannot rule out the influence of unconscious diffusion of ideas.

or an originally combative opponent may be persuaded to offer signs of submission. Such ritual behaviors help to make possible these inherently difficult transactions.

The “reproductive problem” to which Deacon suggests symbolism was the solution, however, required more than assuring a present response; it required assurance of future actions – it required promises. At the point where efficient adaptation to the environment made cross-gender pair bonding necessary, with its division of labor between the provision of meat and care of infants, the stability of what was now necessarily “marriage” required more than nonsymbolic ritual.

Sexual or mating displays are incapable of referring to what might be, or should be. This information can only be given expression symbolically. The pair-bonding in the human lineage is essentially a promise, or rather a set of promises that must be made public. These not only determine what behaviors are probable in the future, but more important, they implicitly determine which future behaviors are allowed and not allowed; that is, which are defined as cheating and may result in retaliation. (ibid.: 399)

Another advantage of symbolic ritual as against purely nonhuman animal ritual is that it gives rise not to ad hoc relationships, but to a whole system of relationships:

Ritualized support is also essential to ensure that all members of the group understand the newly established contract and will behave accordingly. As in peacemaking, demonstrating that these relationships exist and providing some way of marking them for future reference so that they can be invoked and enforced demand the explicit presentation of supportive indices, not just from reproductive partners but from all significant kin and group members. . . . Marriage and puberty rituals serve this function in most human societies. . . . The symbol construction that occurs in these ceremonies is not just a matter of demonstrating certain symbolic relationships, but actually involves the use of individuals and actions as symbol tokens. Social roles are redefined and individuals are explicitly assigned to them. A wife, a husband, a warrior, a father-in-law, an elder – all are symbolic roles, not reproductive roles, and as such are defined with respect to a complete system of alternative or complementary symbolic roles. Unlike social status in other species, which is a more-or-less relationship in potential flux, symbolic status is categorical. As with all symbolic relationships, social roles are defined in the context of a logically complete system of potential transformations; and because of this, all members of a social group (as well as any potential others from the outside) are assigned an implicit symbolic relationship when any one member changes status. (ibid.: 406)

And Deacon points out that, over the last million years, although language undoubtedly developed toward more self-sufficient vocal symbol systems, whose very power was the degree to which they could become context-free, nonetheless, “symbols are still extensively tied to ritual-like cultural practices and paraphernalia. Though speech is capable of conveying many forms of information independent of any objective supports, in practice there are often extensive physical and social contextual supports that affect what is communicated” (ibid.: 407).

Deacon’s argument runs remarkably parallel to that of Goffman, Collins, and of course Durkheim. The point is that symbolism (including centrally language), social solidarity based on a moral order, and individual motivation to conform, all depend on ritual. But Deacon, as we have seen has indicated that the very first emergence of